User blog:Holomanga/Existential Risks Facing Civilisations
Whilst the megaverse is full of many tales of civilisations surviving, it is full of plenty of civilisations ''not ''surviving. This gruesome sample size is unfortunately enough to create a reasonable typology of risks that face civilisations at all levels; illegal emulations have also netted results in the field before the peacekeeping forces of the megaverse put a stop to it. Natural Risks Natural risks are constant state risks that all life faces as a condition of existing in an occasionally hostile universe. Their impacts are typically limited in scope (since universes with high enough natural risks never form life in the first place), but they are also difficult to mitigate for planetary civilisations, especially those that are still bound to the natural environment of their homeworld. Supernovae Massive stars, when their fuel is depleted, undergo a core collapse, where the core rapidly shrinks and heats up as it fuses increasingly massive elements. This causes a temporary increase in luminosity of massive proportions; a star undergoing supernova can outshine the entire galaxy. Ionising radiation released from this event can cause significant damage to the environments of nearby planets; close enough to the supernova, reactions between the released radiation and the atmosphere can reduce the amount of ozone leaving the surface vulnerable to harmful solar radiation. Asteroids Solar systems are naturally filled with a large number of asteroids, small sub-plantary mass bodies left over from the formation of the system. These carry a great deal of energy due to their fast orbital velocities and positions high in the gravity well of any concerned planet, and, upon collision, can drastically alter the environment by releasing large amounts of dust and energy, to levels that may be uninhabitable to civilisations still dependent on their natural environment. The larger the asteroid, the greater this threat, which is small but constant up until a civilisation develops the spaceflight capabilities to redirect asteroids. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/asteroid-detection Supervolcanoes On planets with geological activity due to a molten core, energetic eruptions of magma from the mantle occur, called volcanoes. These vary in size, up to and including supervolcanoes, which can eject enough ash and dust to cool the environment enough to significantly reduce food production. This can cause significant harm to the viability of unprepared civilisations that lack the infrastructure to transfer, stockpile, or alter the growth patterns of food for the years it may take for the environment to return to normalcy. Planetary Civilisational Risks These planetary civilizational risks are risks that mostly face planetary civilisations, during then dangerous times when they are bound to a single planet. The technological development that takes place during this time leads to risks inherent in the transitions from a primitive civilisation into a more advanced one, and increases in the available energy resources gives the civilisation the capability to completely destroy itself for the first time. Climate Change Industrialisation puts unforeseen stresses on a civilisation’s environment that can lead to it becoming uninhabitable, such as through carbon dioxide emissions heating up the environment, potentially to disastrous levels. For small civilisations that are still dependent on the environment of their homeworld, this is especially dangerous. A second category of risks are those from deliberate geoengineering. Civilisations sometimes develop technology that allows them to drastically alter the environment of their homeworld (for example, by blocking out their star with large solar shades or by releasing dust) when at an early stage, and improperly handled these can also lead Nanotechnological Many civilisations use atomically precise nanotechnology at some point in their technological history. The economic benefits are hard to overstate: the range and quality of products that can be made with nanotechnology are significantly larger than with conventional techniques, and sophisticated nanotechnological techniques are almost a requirement for interstellar expansion (though it is definitely possible without). A civilisation unable to properly control nanotechnological development finds itself going down two main paths: *Hybrid nano scenarios: widely available molecular nanotechnology makes the creation of weapons, such as nuclear, asteroid-based, and nanobiological, significantly cheaper and easier. *Grey goo scenarios: nanotechnology is built that self-replicates and eventually dominates the material resources of the planet, including consuming the inhabiting civilisation. Cognitive The ability to enhance their minds is a technology developed by some civilisations. This also has clear benefits – increasing intelligence boosts the capabilities of members of the civilisations, and increasing the variety of experience possible increases that amount of value that can be extracted from constrained resources. However, there are some pathological states that minds can be enhanced into. These follow two main branches, called traps: *Hansonian trap: minds are modified to be optimised for economic productivity, rather than useful values. Economically-focused minds are typically mostly unconscious, and though they perform activity it is not of the kind that the civilisation values and is often simplistic and stereotyped enough to not be significantly more valuable than physics. The Hansonian trap can often lead to a Malthusian trap, where intense competition makes coordination impossible; this is discussed more below. *Skinnerian trap: minds are modified to be optimised for pleasure. This is less immediately concerning than the Hansonian trap, but an inability to suffer makes a civilisation significantly more vulnerable to the Coordination Problems Civilisations rely on coordination at every level of advancement; indeed, the purpose of a civilisation is to allow its members to coordinate properly. However, some changes can make it difficult or impossible for a civilisation to coordinate properly, leading to the civilisation becoming unable to mitigate other existential threats. These include: *Malthusian scenarios: population grows large enough that the wealth of individuals is lowered to adaptive subsistence levels, either through natural growth or emulations. At this point, all spare resources are expended on competition, with no surplus for preventing existential risk. *Powerful individuals: technologies are developed that reduce the viable size of social structures, rather than increasing them. Atomically precise manufacturing is one candidate for this, lowering the manufacturing costs such that any community can become autonomous. This can eventually lead to an inter-group Malthusian scenario. *Infohazards: Some civilisations are made up of members vulnerable to infohazards. When these are developed sufficiently, further coordination becomes dangerous due to the increased ease of spreading infohazards, leading to a slow decline from small groups. Biological Biological engineering technology allows for synthetic pathogens to be created, which can infect and kill large amounts of the population and either destroy the civilisation directly or increase the costs of trade and cooperation such that large civilisations are no longer viable. Synthetic pathogens are a significantly greater risk than natural pathogens, leading to them being an actual threat to the existence of planetary civilisations with inadequate countermeasures, because they can be made to have long incubation periods during which they are transmissible but difficult to detect and be highly lethal. High-Energy Weapons Many universes in the megaverse have laws of physics that allow for high-energy weapons to be developed at an early stage in their development, the central example being nuclear weapons. If these are not controlled properly then conflict can render the homeworld uninhabitable, through altering its climate due to particulates thrown up by the nuclear weapons, or can damage the infrastructure such that civilisation regresses to a point where it can not defend against other existential risks. Recovery from a collapse due to a high-energy use is possible to a civilisation, though the regression is sufficiently dangerous that it has directly lead to the end of many. AI Artifical intelligence is often either the best invention or the last invention of a civilisation. For civilisations that develop it, it is typically a significant improvement over their natural intelligence, able to run significantly faster, store more information, and increase in intelligence with a significantly lower recalcitrance to improvement. This means that AI is significantly more capable of achieving its goals than the natural members of a civilisation, to the point where the future fate of the civilisation is determined primarily by the goals of the AI, rather than of the civilisation. If the AI’s goals are badly aligned, this causes the extinction of the civilisation entirely. This can occur due to negligence (a simple goal that is run uncontrollably, a complex goal is given that doesn’t properly capture what the civilisation value) or malice (AI weapons). (And, as a sidenote, if you have technical skills, please work on this. It’s one of the most pressing issues facing modern-day humanity. More info here.) Philosophical Some civilisations undergo a philosophical extinction, where some hostile development in philosophy leads to a voluntary or involuntary extinction. Often, this is the adaptation of some kind of negative utilitarian ethics combined with a superrational decision theory; the civilisation comes to the collective belief that it is better to never have lived, and wipes itself out under the expectation that other civilisations will also. Interstellar Civilisational Risks When a civilisation becomes interstellar, many of the risks that are limited to a single planet are no longer relevant, but new risks come into play, stemming from the ability of an interstellar civilisation to make effective spacefaring replicators. Replicators Interstellar civilisations typically grow by releasing swarms of replicators, space probes able to create additional copies of themselves as well as reconfigure extant matter into forms that are more useful to the values of the civilisation. Incorrectly programmed, replicators can instead simply grow exponentially, with limited ability to command them; this can also happen if the replication is imperfect, since replicators that spread uncontrollably are more adaptive than replicators that don’t so any imperfection that increases the growth rate will become prevalent in the population. Eventually, incorrectly programmed replicators can become more powerful than the originating civilisation, and wipe it out. Berserkers Replicators can also be made for combat, either in fighting interstellar wars or for the purposes of proactive defence. Replicators made for this purpose are called berserkers, or berserker swarms. Existing berserkers often activate upon detecting sufficiently intense activity, to conserve energy during their long hibernation and to reduce the risks of a replicator-style problem happening with much of the parent civilisation’s matter being turned into a berserker swarm. Such intense activity is characteristic of interstellar civilisations that have not yet discovered how to properly hide industry. This means that a pre-existing berserker swarm can wipe them out before they are able to defend against them. Universal Civilisational Risks Universal civilisations are those that have been able to avoid the state risks inherent in the use of replicator and came to inhabit their entire universe. However, the mass-energy resources available to these civilisations gives them the ability to also cause damage on the scale of their entire universe. State Transition The clear majority of inhabited universes are not physically unstable, owing to their long lifetimes – the establishment of a civilisation typically occurs on the order of – 1010 years after the beginning of the universe. However, this gives no guarantee of stability – many civilisations inhabit universes that are instead metastable, existing in a state that can be altered by sufficiently high-energy interactions. When a civilisation becomes universal, it gains the capability to perform interactions more powerful than any that have occurred previously. This means that they can precipitate state transitions, and if not properly prepared will be wiped out due to being incompatible with the new laws of physics. Nudge Pollution As a civilisation advances to the universal level, the frequency of gravitational anomalies can often rapidly increase as neighbouring copies of it in the multiverse make use of early metaspace transport that relies on directly influencing nearby universes. The effect of this is that any universal civilisation that chooses to abstain from travelling between universes, but that takes no measures to coordinate with nearby copies of itself in the multiverse, finds itself shook apart in an increasingly hostile spacetime. Sufficiently intense nudges can also precipitate state transitions. Multiversal Civilisational Risks Multiversal civilisations are resilient to the risks faced by universal civilisations, with the ability universe-wide alteration of physics eventually becoming an asset rather than a threat. Even at this large scale, there are still ever-larger risks, originating from the use of technologies that can manipulate universes, universe cohorts, multiverses, and higher. Local Heat Death An early multiversal civilisation finds itself in a race against time, with the universe it is in being old and multiversal transport initially requiring setup times on the order of billions of years (as the infrastructure must be laid over much of a Hubble volume). It is possible to reach a state where there is not enough free energy for perpetuation in the entire reachable multiverse, with the horizon of formation of new universes being too distant to access. Eventually, SAWs render this constrain reduntant, as a glider can be targeted to reach arbitarily distant universes, including ones that are younger and have more free energy. Extrauniversal technology also grants the ability to melt down universes for their vacuum energy, providing an abundant power source that is very difficult to exhaust. Glider Contact In operating SAWs, multiversal civilisations release a large number of gliders which can destructively interact with distant universes in a manner similar to nudge pollution, but potentially much more acute depending on the scale of the glider payload. A universal civilisation that has its universe targeted by a glider can easily be destroyed by it, and multiversal civilisations in their early stages also face similar risks. Steamrolling The ordinary operations of a cosmic entity are often of an immense scale, with even modest cosmic entities commanding exponential numbers of universes. Care is taken to ensure that cosmic entities do not interfere with the operations of small civilisations, but occasionally this happens, with entire universes being instantly destroyed during routine activities. Despite the grim prognosis, this is often not a fatal risk for a civilisation – cosmic entities are legally required to keep backups of the regions that they operate in for this purposes. Restoration from backup does not cause any problems for the involved civilisation. Category:Blog posts